My 7 Biggest Lessons From Launching GrowthAssistant

Alex Lieberman: What's up, everyone? I'm Alex Lieberman. 

Jesse Pujji: Yo, this is Jesse Pujji. 

Alex Lieberman: And this is The Crazy Ones. 

Jesse Pujji: What's up, everyone? It's Jesse Pujji from The Crazy Ones. I'm doing a quick episode today. I tweeted out recently that GrowthAssistant hit its two-year anniversary, and I shared a bunch of lessons, and Alex said, “These lessons will be great to share with everyone. So why don't you do that?” So two years ago we started the business. February 10th is actually the anniversary. We're over $7 million in ARR two years in, which is kind of crazy and insane. And there's really seven things I learned that I wanted to share with everyone. I'm just gonna take 'em one by one. 

So the first lesson was, follow demand. And here, you know, the story I tell is my former employees from Ampush would go run growth at different brands, and they really needed help with all the mundane or the more challenging rote, but important, tasks to take on. We had an offshore team at Ampush that supported them, and then they all of a sudden found themselves without that support, and they would call me saying, “Hey, Jesse, I need this, I need this. Does it exist?” And I kept saying, “No, I've never heard of anything. No, I've never heard of anything.” And immediately thought to myself, I gotta start this. This needs to be on the list. And so when you're thinking about your business or starting a business, look around for issues people are already having, or a problem you're already having. And that demand will serve you well as you get going. 

Number two. This is one that's near and dear to my heart. Amazon has this value of “bias to action.” I wrote, “Just do it.” You can really get stuck in overthinking. And I know tons of entrepreneurs, myself included, for the first year of starting Ampush, all I did was think and analyze and look at numbers. GrowthAssistant on, this is not a lie, on January 15th, I had no plans on my mind to start it. On January 20th, I was catching up with Adriane, who's now our CEO, who was transitioning out of her job and career in HR and recruiting. And as I was talking to her about it, you know, and what she was gonna do, I immediately said, “Oh wait, I had this idea on my list—we should do this.” And no less than 20 days later, we had a deck, we had a very basic website, we bought the domain, and we were pitching a handful of first customers, my former employees, and telling them we had this offshore capability.

So the speed at which we did that, within a hundred days, we were at $50,000 in MRR, and it just, we just didn't overthink it. We could've analyzed the perfect angle, what job roles there were, we could have done customer interviews. And a lot of the thinking is out there to say that. To me, it's like, just get going. You're gonna adjust while you do it. And so lesson two is just do it. 

Number three is, you know, you hear a lot about product-market fit. I like to think about founder-market fit. So what does that mean? That means, does the founder know the business that they're getting into? I had done a lot in growth marketing. I knew exactly what it took to run a Facebook campaign and landing page optimization. And Adriane had recruited hundreds of folks in her job in finance over 10 years. We both knew the offering and the product, and it really helped us go fast. Why would we start a healthcare company? Maybe if you're interested in that, go start it. But if your goal is to be a successful entrepreneur, going and picking something you know nothing about and that's totally random is not likely to lead to a ton of success, especially out of the gate. And so, you know, that was a huge part of it. The founder-market fit. Picking a market, picking a problem you understand is hugely important. 

Number four here is “expect the unexpected.” So everybody comes in with grand plans, and one of my favorite quotes to tell everyone is, “Plans are useless. Planning is invaluable.” And what that means is that the plans, you know, they're gonna change within three months of doing them, but the planning, which is the thinking about what may happen, is incredibly valuable. And so when I say expect the unexpected, we ended up growing the business through Twitter. That's 75% of the business comes through Twitter. We didn't even have a Twitter handle until six months into the business. And I wasn't even doing much on Twitter at that time myself. And so I would've never guessed when we started the business that Twitter ended up being the vector that drove it forward. But Twitter was, and so just be ready. Look for those lucky breaks. Be okay with things going in a different direction than maybe you originally planned, and expect the unexpected. 

Number five, somewhat related to that, and relates to kind of being out in the world. Normally when people have a business idea, it's a telltale sign for me that they're new to entrepreneurship when they go, “Oh, I need you to sign an NDA, or, oh, I'll share one page of my deck with you, not 10 pages.” I take that and say, share to the point…wherever you feel uncomfortable, share 10 times more than that. That might mean tweeting about it. That might mean an email newsletter. That might mean sending your deck to anyone who will read it. The reality is the world is a very busy, noisy place. And so it's important to be pretty loud if you want people to pay attention. That goes in marketing, that goes in fundraising. Get out there and share as much as you possibly can. 

Number six: Your co-founder matters a lot. You know, Adriane and I have a fun story. We met at seventh grade pre-algebra and we were best friends ever since. She's like the sister I've never had. We had done school projects together. We had built homecoming floats together, we had had arguments and fights and, you know, made up, and kind of everything you could imagine that two long-term friends go through. I think the trust is so much more important than complementary skill sets, if they're in conflict. Starting a business with someone is a marriage. It's all the things you think, and whoever that person is, you have to have a lot of trust and they have to trust you a lot. And as we've gotten going, and I've compared that with some of the other businesses at Gateway X, it's just, everything's easier because both of us have…we trust each other and know we have each other's best interests at heart. And it really helps. 

And then seven, and you know, the ultimate purpose from my perspective for any business and the why, is people. And one of the cool things about GrowthAssistant is, we're helping people in the US get to work on more interesting work. We're helping people in the Philippines get out of the sweatshops and the call centers, instead work on with startups and knowledge work and have stable jobs. And we're building a really cool culture and organization. And so, you know, at every turn we talk a lot about the people. We, even when we sell the offering, we say, “That's not gonna work because it won't work for the people, for our people, or that's not gonna work well for you as a customer.” And so we're really focused on people, and people being the purpose of what we do, and that helps us make decisions better and ultimately leads us to a lot of success. 

So two years in, it's been a great ride already. I'm sure there's gonna be tons of other lessons, but those are the seven that came up for me as I was thinking about our two-year anniversary. As always, if you enjoyed this episode, email us at thecrazyones@morningbrew.com, send me feedback or other lessons you've had, and we'll see you next time.